North Korea on Thursday announced for the first time that it has nuclear weapons and rejected moves to restart disarmament talks any time soon, saying it needs the weapons as protection against an increasingly hostile United States.This should put Europe in an interesting position...do you support a crazy dictator (that's Kim Jong Il for you lefties with your heads in the sand) or do you support freedom?
The communist state’s pronouncement dramatically raised the stakes in the two-year-old nuclear confrontation and posed a grave challenge to President Bush, who started his second term with a vow to end North Korea’s nuclear program through six-nation talks.
“We ... have manufactured nukes for self-defense to cope with the Bush administration’s ever more undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the (North),” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
Prior to the Iraq war, I was of the opinion that we should have taken action against North Korea first. Now...I am not so sure. I think he had these weapons back then and is only now declaring that he has them because he has to in order to get attention.
I still think that diplomacy is the best way to handle this situation...mainly because we're now involved in a massive effort to transform the Middle East and don't have the kind of military assets handily available that could take on a threat like NK. Plus, now we know for sure that they are a nuke power...and that changes everything.
Mark's Remarks
Kim Jong Il is an evil tyrant. He is deranged. We knew he had these desires for weapons, and what did we do? We, under the auspices of Albright, Gore, and Clinton, gave this man-child brat the very things he needed to create the power: the reactors, the manuals, the centrifuge. All we had him do was pledge to not go after weapons. Very little oversight, very little enforcement. And for what end? Another vain attempt at legacy--namely the idea of another toothless piece of paper treaty!
This just goes to show that legacy-seeking appeasers are not good for the country, and the legacy they really leave is not the one they intended...
